


paint your lies white and your nights whiter

by eraserheadbaby



Category: Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Game: Fate/hollow ataraxia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:14:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26720485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eraserheadbaby/pseuds/eraserheadbaby
Summary: He tries to hold her as tight as he can, he really does. He still can only feel a cold distant chill between his arms.
Relationships: Illyasviel von Einzbern/Emiya Shirou
Kudos: 10





	paint your lies white and your nights whiter

**Author's Note:**

> the fact that it took me so long to write smth abt them is a crime
> 
> obviously this is inspired by that shirou/illya scene in hollow ataraxia where they sleep together... hope my tweaks on it worked!

When was the last time Shirou slept properly? Even when he is in his home's relative safety - “relative” being the key word here – the tiniest sound is enough to make his stomach churn.

And that's how he finds himself counting slow footsteps, creeping up his spine as they come from somewhere inside the house. Saber can't possibly have let an intruder pace around leisurely like this, even just considering the idea is an insult to her. Still, the warranty in not enough to calm his flaky heartbeat.

He's still trying to deduce something from the footsteps when he notices his room is superabound in a certain smell. A soft smell, familiar in a way he can't put his finger on in his state. Not tinged with any synthetic cologne, yet not natural or terrene in any sense.

It's also tranquilizing enough to make Shirou's eyes start closing again. It affects him to the point where the footsteps regain his attention only when they come from almost next to him. They pause momentarily, to be followed by the rustling of his futon.

Now Shirou forces his eyes open for good. A vague white thing is the first he can make out. His arm reflexively comes up, in what is a punch, a slap, who knows what exactly. The thing doesn't flinch, and it's then he realizes he needs to open his eyes more, so he does. And looks.

Oh, does he look. It can't be helped after all, the moonlight coming from the window complements Illya's hair perfectly. Her eyes shine just as bright, looking straight at him.

Wait. Illya's eyes. Looking. At him. In his room. In the middle of the night.

“Illya?! What on earth are you doing here?!”. Shirou can only hope the night found a way to swallow his scream.

“Jeez, what's with the pointless questions? Obviously, I'm going to sleep”. No apology or regret to be found in Illya's response.

Oh. So that's what this is about. Again.

“You can't sleep here, I've told you so many times already!”

“And I still don't get why! Besides, I know you can't sleep. Your tossing and turning could be heard from the living room!”

He's heard this so many times already, he should have built up a trustworthy immunity. So why is it now that he finds his defenses coming down?

It's probably that he only now realized that, if she heard him struggling to fall asleep, it means she can't sleep either.

It's definitely not that he's after that beautiful scent Illya brought with her.

“... Alright”. He barely gets to utter his truce before Illya's shoulders and arms start an impromptu celebratory dance and her cheer ruptures the nightly peace. His plea to keep quiet gets ignored too, as Illya wastes no time moving closer to his futon.

Her lush skirt rubs irregularly against the cheap texture of the futon. “Wait, aren't you going to change? You're still wearing your clothes...”

Illya pouts like she just heard the most bogus combination of words possible. “Obviously, I can't change here!”. The pout reverses to form a smirk, and her eyes become devilish slits. “That is, unless you want me to...”

Images, unneeded and uncalled for, rotate through his mind, but the slideshow is quick enough to deliver him a good blow back to reality. “N-No! Don't say those things so casually!”

“You always take everything so seriously! You're no fun, Shirou.” And with that, Illya finally makes her grand entrance on the inside of his futon.

The past few minutes have been a bit too chaotic for his semi-conscious brain, but they lead into a rather stable image: Shirou, trying to measure as accurately as he can the centimeters needed to keep a decent distance between them inside the microscopic futon. Illya, repeatedly and brutishly trespassing those centimeters and treating his arm like a stand-in for her horde of teddy bears.

With Illya's insistent closeness returns that smell, much stronger than before, much more hypnotic than before.

This time, he feels ready to cede to it his entire being and close his eyes, until the reins are yanked by Illya's eyelashes batting against his shoulder – when did she get so close!? - and her sigh tickling his ear. “Shirou, you're so cold!”

“Sorry for not being an adequate heater”.

Cold – it really is cold. It's not coming from him, though. It is Illya. It's her words that made him notice it, but it's all around him now. Not the natural cold of the open night air; a skulking cold.

A paranormal cold.

Not that he should be shaken by these things by now. Only that the paranormal so far has been paired with specific emotions in his mind: fear, awe, helplessness. Now, he finds himself... sad. Just sad. They are two people almost shoved together, but this paranormal air around them speaks of nothing but loneliness.

“Kiritsugu was pretty cold too. Sometimes hugging him felt like hugging an iceberg!”. Illya sounds like she's talking to herself. Her expression could easily be called one of fondness, but he knows the truth. This isn't fondness. This is merely nostalgia over times long dead and gone; not the nostalgia of flipping through a photo album, but the remembrance that comes with a funeral.

Kiritsugu. He always finds a way to slip between Shirou and Illya. It is the one link between them that refuses to break, and if he could, he wouldn't let it. He would bind it even tighter, share his treasured memories with Illya, hear her own stories about the person that is the only reason he is still breathing.

Maybe he ought to be glad that Illya doesn't let him delude himself any further, that she paints a picture of Kiritsugu so different to the man he knew as his father that he sometimes doubts they are even talking about the same person. And maybe he really is glad, to some extent – but that can't make him forgive the anger that sometimes rears its head from somewhere inside of him.

Would Kiritsugu allow himself such an emotion? Surely muzzling it would be his only choice, so it's the choice Shirou has to make as well.

“... Will you leave me too, Shirou?”

It's usually unnervingly easy to overlook Illya's age, assume everyone in this war carries the same amount of life experience on their back, but Shirou doesn't have that luxury here. Here and now, Illya can be nothing but a child: only a child can set loose such questions so easily.

Only a child is capable of this kind of cruelty, cruelty without intention, without malice. 

But this isn't any child. This is Illya, whose cruelty can also bring about torn limbs and fountains of blood. Having both kinds of cruelty in the palm of her hands, she still chooses the right one. And isn't making the most prudent choice an achievement of adulthood? Shirou should honor her resolve with a truthful answer. An exchange between adults.

Except that, if Illya is an adult, maybe he's the child after all. Because, looking at her face right now, there's suddenly so much to be afraid of. 

The anxiety he sees in that face as it awaits his oath of devotion. The intuition about it being overcome by sadness, once it learns that it's asking for the impossible. The day he won't be able to see this face anymore. 

Shirou has to run and hide, he has to be cruel, in a way that Illya isn't, in the way he knows best. 

“I'm not going anywhere, Illya. I'll be here for you... forever.”

She doesn't believe him. When she looks at him, her eyes are actually looking somewhere past him, or maybe somewhere that isn't even this room in the first place. When she smiles, he has no reason to believe it is directed at him at all. Those eyes, that smile, they are directed at another Shirou, one that says the very same words to Illya, but means every last one of them.

Or maybe it is more fitting to say that these are the eyes and the smile of another Illya, one who can actually find meaning in promises of forever.

Those centimeters he put between them feel ready to partition them off even further. What he can do against it is wrap his arms around Illya and bring her to his chest, let her happy exhale hit his throat.

And as she exhales, Shirou inhales. Tries desperately to breathe in as much of that smell as possible. The only thing that enters his lungs is blank air.

He tries to hold her as tight as he can, he really does. He still can only feel a cold distant chill between his arms.


End file.
